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I've been hitting the google pretty hard trying to find an answer to this, but it's always a different scenario than what I'm trying to do. I'm not a networking wizard, but I have set up a pretty good wireless network in the house. I just can't figure out how to do this one thing.
I have a wireless router that every computer, including the xbox 360, connect to the internet through. Pretty simple. I have my Xbox and my laptop in the same room, without everyone else's PCs in different rooms. I can stream music and videos from my laptop to my Xbox 360 through the router wirelessly. But I think it's a little stupid to have to even use the router when they're right next to each other. Plus, I have HD videos that I can't quite stream properly because of the degrade in signal from having to travel so far.

So...

Can I directly connect my XP PC and my Xbox 360 wirelessly without using te router in order to share files? And can I still have my Xbox connected to Xbox LIVE wirelessly through the router at the same time? I don't think the Xbox can be connected to two different devices at once (being the PC and the router), but maybe there is a way to do this. I know I can just use a LAN cable to hook them both up, but then the Xbox can't use LIVE and I'd like to not have it use the PC's internet connection.

Your Xbox can only be connected wirelessly to one thing at a time, and it is probably too stupid to be able to connect to two networks simultaneously.

Try connecting your laptop to the internet and then using a crossover cable to your Xbox from your laptop, then go into your network settings and make a network bridge. I don't know how your laptop would act on the network in this scenario, but this is the basic description of the network setup that people used back with Halo 2 to do standby-ing (along with an IP filter, such as Zone Alarm, but I highly suggest you don't do that).

So you probably would want to make an ad-hoc wifi network from your laptop and have a network bridge with it and the internet, like if you wiredly connect your laptop to the internet then bridge that connection with the wireless adhoc network. That is just my best guess, as I have never done anything like that.

That's always been a solution, but I haven't done it because of a few reasons. Not least of which is the fact that my laptop has a G wireless, while the 360 has an N, so it'd be a downgrade for the Xbox. I used to use my old desktop as a gateway for the 360 back before anything I had was wireless. With the two wired together, the Xbox could stream the PC files and connect to the internet through the PC. I didn't even have a router at the time.
Another big reason is because I'm having a lot of problems with the laptop's wireless. Maybe I should deal with that first.

That's always been a solution, but I haven't done it because of a few reasons. Not least of which is the fact that my laptop has a G wireless, while the 360 has an N, so it'd be a downgrade for the Xbox. I used to use my old desktop as a gateway for the 360 back before anything I had was wireless. With the two wired together, the Xbox could stream the PC files and connect to the internet through the PC. I didn't even have a router at the time.
Another big reason is because I'm having a lot of problems with the laptop's wireless. Maybe I should deal with that first.

Thanks ferrari. You've backed up what I had figured.

And every time I see your avatar and caption, I laugh.

Lololol thanks.

Also, I'm assuming that the Xbox's wireless N runs at 2.4GHz, so it would only be able to have a throughput of about 115Mb/s so if you just bought a cheap 100Mb/s 3-port switch you should be able to do what you want. Wireless G runs at 54Mb/s optimally.

Just while futzing around with stuff. My parents' house had internet back in the days of dial-up, so the house is hard-wired for tubes!
Then it was just a matter of messing around with modding my Xbox and running it into a network. That and I just find it somewhat interesting.

IE: Knowing the maximum throughput of wireless-N is from getting a wireless-N router that is capable of 300Mb/s, but I found that it is inadvisable to use all of the 40MHz spectrum that is available to the 2.4GHz wireless range, so it runs at less than half that at 20MHz bandwidth because. This varies non-proportionally because of how a packet scales with data sizes. I'm also a licensed amateur-radio operator, lol. And I had a CISCO networking class.

That's fine ferrari. That's a bit farther than I'm willing to go for this small issue. I can still put my HD content on a flash drive and play it from there.

I had dial-up for years and years, that's where I learned a lot of my network optimization tricks. But now that I have a somewhat proper set-up I've had some fun making sure it's as good as possible with a great router and every computer optimally set. But unlike ferrari, I don't find it "interesting". More of a pain in the ass at times. I guess I only know what I know to make it all as easy as possible.
If you're around it enough, you pick up a thing or three.

Like I said, my network is well done, I just have some restrictions on Xbox file sharing I wanted to get around. I wasn't sure if I could wirelessly connect the two and still be on the network, oh well.

To expand (reiterate) what ferrari said, it won't be possible to connect your Xbox directly to your computer wirelessly without a router. A router gives each device a network IP, something along the lines of 192.168.1.*, usually. Your computer doesn't have this ability. The only thing you'd be able to do is ICS through the laptop, which you said you wanted to avoid.

To expand (reiterate) what ferrari said, it won't be possible to connect your Xbox directly to your computer wirelessly without a router. A router gives each device a network IP, something along the lines of 192.168.1.*, usually. Your computer doesn't have this ability. The only thing you'd be able to do is ICS through the laptop, which you said you wanted to avoid.

Yeah, I also said I set up my own network. So, thanks for the help, but I knew all that.
What I didn't know is if you can directly connect two devices wirelessly like you can with a crossover cable. I can't see why that wouldn't work. Maybe you can, but if creating that small network prevents me from connecting to the larger network, then I won't do it.
I can still stream content to my Xbox through the router, but I wanted a simpler solution.

Yeah, I also said I set up my own network. So, thanks for the help, but I knew all that.
What I didn't know is if you can directly connect two devices wirelessly like you can with a crossover cable. I can't see why that wouldn't work. Maybe you can, but if creating that small network prevents me from connecting to the larger network, then I won't do it.
I can still stream content to my Xbox through the router, but I wanted a simpler solution.

Well the attitude wasn't really necessary, since I answered your question. No, there is no way to connect your Xbox to your computer wirelessly, directly. You need a router in between to facilitate the communications. As far as I know, there is no way to have a single wireless device connected to multiple other wireless devices at the same time. That said, there's still no way to directly connect your xbox to your computer wirelessly.

See my most recently reply. I just tried this with my friend's laptop and she was able to connected directly to my computer and connect through it to the internet. For whatever reason, though, it was only running at like 3Mb/s, effectively. I couldn't find a way to change the transmit/receive speeds anywhere though.

Well the attitude wasn't really necessary, since I answered your question. No, there is no way to connect your Xbox to your computer wirelessly, directly. You need a router in between to facilitate the communications. As far as I know, there is no way to have a single wireless device connected to multiple other wireless devices at the same time. That said, there's still no way to directly connect your xbox to your computer wirelessly.

I didn't mean anything by it. I knew that might sound snarky, hence the "thank you" in there.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ferrari

Here is a tutorial on having your laptop run an ad-hoc network so that your Xbox can connect to and through it to the internet:

Control-click on both your Local Area Connection and your Wireless Network Connection devices, right-click and choose "Bridge Connections"

Connect your wireless devices to your newly-created wireless network

Hope that helps.

I was well aware of that option, but thanks for the right up. Like I said, I had the wired equivalent of this kind of network before but setting it up on my current network isn't the best idea. My laptop doesn't have the best wireless connection and I don't want to have it on whenever I turn on the Xbox. This would make streaming work better, but connecting to the internet would then be unnecessarily complex.

I really appreciate the help you guys are giving me, but I've come to the conclusion that there is no networking solution to this very minor issue. It's not even really an issue, I just thought that having to go through the router to stream content from a computer that my Xbox was sitting right next to didn't make the most sense.

It's also very stupid that I can't use the Xbox'es wireless for the internet, and ethernet for the LAN to my PC.

To an extent, in the computer world distance doesn't make much of a difference. Your Xbox doesn't "know" that it's sitting right next to your laptop, and neiter does your laptop "know" that it's in such close proximity to the Xbox. The best way to do this is going to be to upgrade your laptop's wireless card to an N card (you mentioned that the router and Xbox are both wireless N), that should solve the issue.

I've got an Apache server installed on my computer, which is connected to a wireless network. I test mobile site development on this server and access it on my phone, while sitting in front of my computer. I'm downstairs, the router is upstairs. So essentially my phone is going from me, through the router, then back to the computer to make the request, then the computer sends the data through the router and to my phone, all while I'm sitting less than 3 feet from my computer. It's just how things are.

(note: I know that, of course, distance does matter in computing and electronics in general, but not for the purposes of this. We're only talking a few extra feet from the computer to the router to the xbox as opposed to directly connecting.)

I know you're trying to help, and I do really appreciate that, but damn I wish people would thoroughly read before posting.
I completely understand all that you said, I can't imagine anyone actually thinking otherwise. The problem (again, not REALLY a problem, but still) was that I thought it was unnecessary to have to go through the router to stream from my PC when it made more sense to have a separate, direct, and router independent connection as well as my internet network. Because I only know what I've already done with networking before, I wanted to know if this was possible. I now know it's not thanks to people smarter than me.
I can stream just fine. It's just the really high quality video that chokes up because my laptop doesn't have a very good wireless (good enough for my internet).

Plus, it's LAN connection is still fracked up because of a bad service pack 3 upgrade that I had to uninstall. Thank you Microsoft.